Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The Associated Press reports that the Taliban is returning to areas once cleared by foreign forces, as the U.S. announces its conclusion to the combat mission…which had been announced long in advance. That was very good strategy — for the enemy – they always like to know the forecast in advance. Taliban insurgents have actually announced their defeat of U.S. and allies in the 13-year conflict. Does anyone want to make bets whether or not Afghanistan will return to terrorist rule and women will return to total subjugation?

Cops – nationwide – have had it with the hard core campaign to demonize all officers of law enforcement who keep our towns and cities safe 24/7, risking their lives every day on behalf of the citizens. It may not have been classy, but the turning of backs by uniformed cops to those who wrongly degrade and accuse police of systemic wrong doings was well earned by the mayor of New York City, which also stands as symbolism for all the anti-police naysayers, including the president and his hateful attorney general. They certainly have handled these incidents wrongly, including the governor of Missouri, considering the fact that the two incidents targeted for protests were never the result of racial profiling at all. This is called manufacturing a protest when there is nothing to protest. Police morale is at an all-time low, which does not bode well for American citizens in general.

Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, ISIS, Egypt, China, North Korea, Boco Haram, al Qaeda, Somalia, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Turkey, and et al. Name one place where conditions and/or relations have improved in the last six years. Perhaps we could say that Egypt is better, having recovered from the year of Sharia law under Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, but the Egyptians did that on their own via the will of the people, overthrowing the Brotherhood despite their support by Obama and Hillary. We certainly don’t hear much about Egypt from the administration since Morsi failed.

3 Christian Genocide

Little is heard from President Obama or the United Nations about the barbaric killings of Christians – adults and children – and burnings of Christian churches throughout the middle-east. According to Wiki-Islam, a Christian is killed every five minutes for their beliefs. Nine of the top ten countries that practice Christian persecution, are Islamic countries. In 2012, Turkey was considered in the top 16 of worst countries for Christian persecution. A secular study shows that Christianity is in danger of being totally wiped out in biblical heartlands because of Islamic oppression. Where is the voice of the UN? Where is the voice of the free world? Where is the voice of America?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been named “Most Admired” male and female in a Gallup Poll. Juxtapose that to every competent poll that cites Obama’s track record as president meets disapproval by 50 percent, or more, of voters. Hillary Clinton is certainly the most famous, but it’s inconceivable that she would be admired by voters who can read and write. This is a Secretary of State who accomplished nothing in office other than racking up travel miles and hundreds of photo-ops, who bolted from sight for three months after the Benghazi attack leaving four Americans dead, and who supported the Muslim Brotherhood, and who traveled with her top aide for fifteen years…a Saudi woman who family relatives are all connected to the Muslim Brotherhood…and organization dedicated to the destruction of America. Admired? Are we kidding?

The Islamic State, who President Obama claims is “not Islamic,” has commandeered Iraq and parts of Syria, and are moving forward toward Lebanon, Jordan and the Gaza Strip. Bombing raids from U.S. military appears to have accomplished little as the terror organization continues to grow and non-Muslims are facing forced conversions or death by grotesque means, including the live beheadings of children. What is even more worrisome, is where the ISIS is heading once the conquer their present goals, because it certainly isn’t going to stop there. Once they commandeer Gaza and other nations, they will have to face Egypt where they denounced fundamentalism two years ago. And of course, tiny Israel sits surrounded by enemies on three sides as our president denounces Israel for building new homes. Hmmm

Of course, we know there is no such thing anymore. “Illegal” has always meant that strict laws were in existence and that the breaking of those laws rendered the law breakers guilty, and subject to punishment/deportation. Such laws have been diminished to non-laws by our administration, basically allowing people to flood our nation at will while tying the hands of law enforcers from doing their jobs. What people don’t realize is that 40 percent of illegal immigration comes from overstayed visas, thousands of whom come in from Islamic countries.

All death are tragedies and great losses for those who loved them. But we treat celebrity deaths with great reverence only because they were known and loved by millions, not a few. Topping the list as the greatest losses in 2014, for this blogger, are: Robin Williams, Joan Rivers, Mike Nichols, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Lauren Bacall, James Garner, Ariel Sharon, Shirley Temple, Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, Maya Angelou, Eli Wallach, James Brady.

Bottom line: Free speech won out. Other nations cannot intimidate America with threatening rhetoric, from expressing our 1st amendment rights. Sony capitulated and went for the “risk” despite threats from North Korea, and showed the movie in select theaters which, thus far, has not resulted in violent acts. But…has anyone ever wondered why there has never been a major movie out of Hollywood about the life of Muhammed or the origins of Islam? Every other major figure in ancient history has a bio film to his/her credit…but not this one. And, there never will be. Such is the example that fear and intimidation really does work.

Friday, December 19, 2014

We have often heard Valerie Jarrett is the de-facto President. That might not be far from the truth.

Our team has been exhaustively researching this woman,...again.

We went back over notes, articles and saved links, as well digging deeper into new documents that we've gotten a hold of.

Valerie Jarret is very powerful.

I am hoping to keep our article brief, but there is an awful lot to share.

As you may know, Valerie Jarrett is Obama,'s closest cabinet member. That is no coincidence. She is one who helped get him where he is.

Sure, he knew all the street radicals, but it was Valerie who really got his foot in the door. Without her, he'd still be hustling votes for other "Made" Chicago politicians.

First we'll start with a little personal backround on Ms Jarrett, then we will lay out the sheer magnitude of the corruption that infests Chicago and has now taken hold in the White House itself.

Valerie Bowman Jarrett is an American who was born in Iran, to two American parents. She lived in Iran until the age of 5, then London for another year. The family moved to Chicago when Valerie was almost 7.

From Key Wiki: http://www.keywiki.org/ index.php/Valerie_Jarrett

"Jarrett received her B.A. from Stanford University in 1978 and her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981. Jarrett went to the exclusive University of Chicago Lab School before transferring to her mother’s alma mater, Northfield Mt. Hermon, in western Massachusetts for the last two years of high school.

"After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, she went to work for Chicago’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, whose election many Sixties radicals attributed to themselves. After Washington’s death in 1987, she stayed on under his successor, Richard Daley. In City Hall, she and her colleague Susan Sher recruited Michelle Robinson, then engaged to Barack Obama, and Jarrett quickly melded her way into their lives.

Advocacy

Prior to joining the Obama Administration, Jarrett served as a Director of corporate and not for profit boards, including Chairman of the University of Chicago Medical Center Board of Trustees, and Vice Chair of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees. She was a Director of the Local Initiative Support Corporation, The Joyce Foundation, and a Trustee of the Museum of Science and Industry.

Hiring Michelle

A former Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development under Harold Washington, Jarrett continued to work in the mayor's office into the 1990s.

Valerie Jarrett ran the finances for Obama’s 2004 Senate bid and served as treasurer of Obama's HOPEFUND.

Friendship with Marilyn Katz

Marilyn Katz worked with Students for a Democratic Society. She is a personal friend of Jarrett's. "

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ok. Now that you have some background, we are going to take you on an epic adventure. This adventure is the truth and I will corroroborate the facts with docs and links.

This adventure will take us beyond Chicago, beyond the White House , all the way to the mid East and back.

We will introduce you to some of the most corrupt operatives, foreign Billionaires and many more shady players and events.

Valerie Jarrett Not only worked for powerful Mayor, Harold Johnson, but she was also the daughter in law of another Powerful Chicago politician and Socialite, Vernon Jarrett, a full blown Communist/Progressive. I won't go into too much detail on him, but his Communist associations are well documented and easy to find.

After Washington left office, Valerie stayed on with the new Mayor, Daley.

Through these powerful men and her position inside the Chicago machine, Valerie soon en massed astounding power.

From Key Wiki:

"Jarrett became the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Habitat Company on January 31, 2007. She had served as Executive Vice President of Habitat for 12 years. Prior to that, Jarrett served for eight years in Chicago government as Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development, Deputy Chief of Staff for Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development. Before her city government service, Ms. Jarrett practiced law with two private law firms. From 1995 to 2003, Jarrett served as Chairman of the Chicago Transit Board. Jarrett also served as Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Stock Exchange from April 2004 through April 2007. She was a Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago from January 2006 through April 2007.

Jarrett is the chief executive of The Habitat Company which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems. Officials at Woodlawn Preservation say the government didn't give them enough money to properly maintain Grove Parc. Habitat's Jarrett declined to comment on Grove Parc in particular but said it is hard to manage something you don't own. However other Chicago developers and housing activists said that federal subsidies can be adequate if managed properly. They said Grove Parc stood apart for how badly it fell into disrepair."

Jarrett pretty much had the whole city under her control, by the time she was chosen to be in the White House as Obama's closest Cabinet member. (She was a consideration to take over Obama's vacated seat, but that got too scandalous for her to be associated with. She had to stay above the fray, so it wouldn't jeopardize the agenda.)

Jarret didn't join the Obama administration. The Obama's joined hers!

Jarrett hired Michelle. Then she hired Obama. Both young lawyers with connections of their own. They were already associated with the radical Community organizers, had the key placements in Sidley Law firm, via Bernadine Dohrn and were upwardly mobile in the Chicago system.

When Jarrett left Daley's office to go to the University of Chicago Medical center, Jarrett took Michelle with her, while Obama was to continue in the Daley administration. Obama was being groomed by them, while Jarrett was advancing herself and keeping Michelle close.

If you look at the departments inside the Mayors office, the placements in financial institution boards of directors and her own development corportations, you will understand just how powerful she really is.

Not a brick got laid, a grant awarded, a loan got approved, a subsity or a permit got issued in Chicago, unless Jarret controlled it.

Jarrett made sure she had lawyers at her beck and call, including the Obama's.

As a matter of fact, Jarrett partnered with another powerful Chicagoan, Allison Davis, in her development corporations..

Davis was well connected in his own right. He was the son of Allison Davis Sr., the late University of Chicago professor.

He was the senior partner of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland , (Remember this firm, it will come up later.)

Davis was also appointed to Illinois State Board of Investment by Ill Gov Rod Blagojevich.

Together, Jarrett and Davis were a formidable team with a near monopoly on all Chicago development

Jarrett had bankers, lawyers, investors, and politicians at her beck and call.

Let's talk about some of the land development schemes that Jarrett and her corporations operate and some of the players she's connected to.

The Rezko Connection:

Judicial Watch, www.judicialwatch.org ," has obtained documents linking Valerie Jarrett , an advisor to Barack Obama and the co-chairman of the President-Elect’s transition team, to a series of real estate scandals, including several housing projects operated by convicted felon and Obama fundraiser/friend Antoin "Tony" Rezko.

According to the documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago housing projects operated by real estate developers and Obama financial backers Rezko and Allison Davis. (Davis is also Obama’s former boss.) Jarrett was a member of the Board of Directors for the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation along with several Davis and Rezko associates, as well as the Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization, an organization that worked with Rezko and Davis.

(According to press reports, housing projects operated by Davis and Rezko have been substandard and beset with code violations. The Chicago Sun Times reported that one Rezko-managed housing project was "riddled with problems — including squalid living conditions…lack of heat, squatters and drug dealers.")

As Chief Executive Officer of the Habitat Company Jarrett also managed a controversial housing project located in Obama’s former state senate district called Grove Parc Plaza. According to the Boston Globe the housing complex was considered "uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage…In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale — a score so bad the buildings now face demolition." Ms. Jarrett refused to comment to the Globe on the conditions of the complex.

"Like Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett is a product of the corrupt Chicago political machine. And it is no stretch to say that she was a slumlord," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "We have real concerns about Jarrett’s ethics. Washington already has plenty of corruption. We don’t need to import more of it from Chicago."

Let's talk about Grove Parc , Habitat, Lawnsdale & Woodlawn.

Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until 2007 and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.

Allison Davis, a major fund-raiser for Obama's US Senate campaign and a former lead partner at Obama's former law firm. Davis, a developer, was involved in the creation of Grove Parc and has used government subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,500 units in Chicago, including a North Side building cited by city inspectors last year after chronic plumbing failures resulted in raw sewage spilling into several apartments.

Antoin "Tony" Rezko, perhaps the most important fund-raiser for Obama's early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas buy a home in 2005. Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama's own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations."

VIA: http:// www.brayincandy.com/ id168.html "Grove Parc Plaza was given $4 Mil to upgrade the 500 apartment structure. At that time it was given a failing HUD grade of 82 and 3 yrs and $4 Mil later was declared unlivable w/a grade of 13. It was declared unlivable due to fire damage, mice running in the halls and roofs collapsing.

they wouldn’t turn on the heat for the building during -20 degree temps. She was forced to turn on the heat after being sued by the courts.

One of her single payer type projects was the Lawndale Restoration. It was around 1200 apts in 95 buildings. Jarrett poured over $70 Million govt dollars into these buildings which lasted barely 10 yrs, before they were condemned by the Feds only to start over. This was supposed to be a private/public partnership when in reality it was a cash machine for corrupt politicians through Rezko’s money laundering machine.

For her outstanding work as a slum organizer in the Habitat Corp she made $300K/yr and another $550K in deferred compensation. She made an additional $350K as a member of a number of Boards spread around Chicago."

Barack Obama was among the many Chicago residents who shared Daley’s conviction that private companies would make better landlords than the Chicago Housing Authority ….
He once told the Chicago Tribune that he had briefly considered becoming a developer of affordable housing. But after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, he turned down a job with Tony Rezko’s development company, Rezmar , choosing instead to work at the civil rights law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, then led by Allison Davis.

The firm represented a number of nonprofit companies that were partnering with private developers to build affordable housing with government subsidies ….

Obama translated that belief into legislative action as a state senator. In 2001, Obama and a Republican colleague, William Peterson, sponsored a successful bill that increased state subsidies for private developers. The law let developers designated by the state raise up to $26 million a year by selling tax credits to Illinois residents. For each $1 in credits purchased, the buyer was allowed to decrease his taxable income by 50 cents.

Obama also cosponsored the original version of a bill creating an annual fund to subsidize rents for extremely low-income tenants , although it did not pass until 2005, after he had left the state Senate.

“He was very passionate about the issues,” said Julie Dworkin of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, who worked with Obama on affordable housing issues. “He was someone we could go to and count on him to be there .”

The developers gave Obama their financial support. Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko all served on Obama’s campaign finance committee when he won a seat in the US Senate in 2004 .

Over the next nine years , Rezmar used more than $87 million in government grants, loans, and tax credits to renovate about 1,000 apartments in 30 Chicago buildings . Companies run by the partners also managed many of the buildings, collecting government rent subsidies.

Rezmar collected millions in development fees but fell behind on mortgage payments almost immediately . On its first project, the city government agreed to reduce the company’s monthly payments from almost $3,000 to less than $500.

As Obama ascended, Rezko became one of his largest fund-raisers. And in 2005, Rezko and his wife helped the Obamas purchase the house where they now live.

Eleven of Rezmar’s buildings were located in the district represented by Obama, containing 258 apartments. The building without heat in January 1997, the month Obama entered the state Senate, was in his district. So was Jones’s building with rats in the walls and Frizzell’s building that lacked insulation. And a redistricting after the 2000 Census added another 350 Rezmar apartments to the area represented by Obama.

But Obama has contended that he knew nothing about any problems in Rezmar’s buildings.

Allison Davis, Obama’s former law firm boss, dabbled in development for years while he worked primarily as a lawyer. He participated in the development of Grove Parc Plaza. And in 1996, Davis left his law firm to pursue a full-time career as an affordable housing developer, fueled by the subsidies from the Daley administration and aided, on occasion, by Obama himself.

Over roughly the past decade, Davis’s companies have received more than $100 million in subsidies to renovate and build more than 1,500 apartments in Chicago, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally. In several cases, Davis partnered with Tony Rezko. In 1998 the two men created a limited partnership to build an apartment building for seniors on Chicago’s South Side. Obama wrote letters on state Senate stationery supporting city and state loans for the project." (Remember, Allison Davis is Jarret's partner and he's Former Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.)

Summary:

Obama always had an interest in public housing. In fact, Rezko recruited Obama when Obama was a student at Harvard Law in order to serve in some capacity in Rezko’s slum landlord enterprise.
Obama as a state legislator passed and authored bills to provide tax credits and other incentives for private companies to transform public housing into private-public partnerships that would yield profit to investors such as Rezko, Allison Davis and Valerie Jarrett.
Mayor Richard Daley and Obama both participated in this effort.
Obama passed and authored these laws as Rezko’s tenements in his district were deteriorating.
Obama even wrote letters to City Commissioners in order to obtain more revenue for Rezko when residents of Rezko’s tenements were filing complaints, complaints Obama may or may not have received. As Obama states, “it is possible” his office received complaints from Rezko’s slum tenants. Obama wrote these letters for Rezko at a time when City Commissioners knew of the squalor plaguing Rezko’s slum landlord business.

Valerie Jarrett. The Real Power & Corruption Behind The Oval Office. Part 2.

In Part 1, we told you of how Valerie Jarrett controls developing in Chicago. We told you of all the boards she sits on, her Development companies, her partner Allison Davis and her connections to Obama and Michelle.

Now we want to introduce you to other movers and shakers in the Chicago corruption machine that Valerie Jarrett controls.

Nadhmi Auchi is an Iraqi Billionaire. He was convicted of fraud in the oil for food scandal. Auchi is an arms dealer, Oil mogul and invests in many real estate properties. Auchi was barred from entering the US due to his fraud conviction.There is a lot of info on Auchi out there. More on Auchi: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Nadhmi_Auchi

Three weeks before Obama bought his mansion, Auchi loaned Rezko $3 million Dollars. The mansion deal was arranged by Rezko, who we know was already doing business with Jarrett. Remember, she was on the boards and committees that controlled real estate & development in Chicago.

The bank was Mutual bank of Harvey , run by Amrish Mahajan.

The data available in the Sun-Times spreadsheet is corroborated by the following data, which is democratically available at the Federal Election Commission ‘s website:

Not only was Mahajan a member of Rezko’s bundling network; his bank, the Mutual Bank of Harvey, granted Rita Rezko the $500,000 mortgage she needed in order to purchase the lot on which the Obama mansion in Chicago sits. As many of you may recall, the Obamas could not have purchased the mansion they could not afford unless transactions for the mansion and the lot closed on the same day. Obama needed to locate someone who would buy the lot, and he approached Rezko, the convicted slumlord with whom Obama toured the property before they mutually agreed to the following arrangement :

The home and lot sales closed on June 15, 2005. A land trust controlled by the Obamas bought the house for $1.65 million, and the Obamas secured a $1.32 million mortgage from Northern Trust to complete that purchase. That same day, Rezko’s wife, Rita Rezko, bought the side lot for $625,000. A $37,000- a-year Cook County employee, she secured a $500,000 mortgage from Mutual Bank of Harvey.

The structure of this transaction begs the following question: What bank would lend a government employee who earns $37,000 per annum a $500,000 mortgage? What bank would assume such a risk?

The Mutual Bank of Harvey, of course, for the Mutual Bank of Harvey’s President is a man who is deeply connected to the Chicago machine that backed Barack Obama. Indeed, Amrish Mahajan was one of Mayor Daley’s first political appointments in 1989, when he was named to a seat on Chicago’s Plan Commission, where he would be joined by Obama’s former boss and Rezko’s business partner Allison Davis and by Valerie Jarrett, Daley’s Chief of Staff who chaired the Commission from 1991-1995 . Mahajan, in other words, worked with those who devised and profited from Daley’s failed public housing experiment in Chicago , a public housing policy Obama helped fund as state Senator and US Senator .

Rezko, according to the Boston Globe , was one of the major beneficiaries of Obama’s legislative advocacy for funding of Daley’s public housing experiment. Other major beneficiaries are Jarrett and Allison Davis. Mahajan was also a beneficiary, for his bank had made $3.4 million dollars in loans to Tony Rezko’s slum landlord business since 2002 . A banker for one of the slumlords who benefitted from the Daley housing program Obama helped bankroll, Mahajan was returning a favor when he wrote a $500,000 mortgage in 2005 for the wife of one of his clients. Although Tony’s financial problems were mounting in 2005 , and althoughRita earned only $35,000 per annum, Mahajan underwrote the mortgage.

" Jarrett was an associate between 1981 and 1984 at Ballard, Shepard and Pole Ltd. and then moved on to a real estate practice at Sonnenschein, Carlin, Nath and Rosenthal. But Jarrett "wasn't happy with private practice," recalled Judd Miner , ". . . and she wanted to get involved in the Washington administration." Miner recruited Jarrett to the city's Law Department with the corporation counsel under the late Mayor Harold Washington.

According to the Sun Times, “A few years later, back in private practice, Miner would make another recruiting coup: a young Harvard Law School graduate named Barack Obama. And over at City Hall, Jarrett, Daley's deputy chief of staff, would hire another lawyer fleeing corporate life, Michelle Robinson, Obama's then-fiancée.” Could it be possible that Jarrett already knew Obama at this point if she had worked for Miner? The Sun Times also mentions that Obama and Michelle's marriage might never have happened if they had not met at the Chicago law frim of Sidley & Austin in the summer of 1989. Michelle Robinson was the lawyer assigned to be his adviser. Somewhat curious....

It is noteworthy to mention that after Jarrett left Daley’s office she took Michelle Obama with her to the Chicago Housing Department to be her assistant. This coincided precisely with the time Obama was installed at Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland where he was writing the “bids” for Tony Rezko’s companies. Is it possible that these bids were coincidentally being approved by Jarrett and Michelle? Very curious…" VIA: http://theventingpost.com/ candidconcepts/ 114-who-is-valerie-jarrett- part-ii.html

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Let's talk about the mansion. It is a known fact there is a lawyer named on the Deed. That lawyer is Micelli. Micelli just so happens to work at Miner Barnhill & Galland, Allison Davis' old firm. Micelli is also listed as esquire on many other Rezko, Jarrett, Davis & Obama documents.

"In 1993, Obama became an associate lawyer with a small Chicago firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland . It was during this time that he first became involved with a real estate developer named Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was subsequently indicted on charges of fraud, extortion and money laundering and will go on trial on Feb. 25. William Miceli, Obama’s supervisor at the law firm, said the firm represented the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., a nonprofit group that redeveloped a run-down property on Chicago’s South Side with Rezko.

What’s interesting to note is that the person the Washington Post interviewed regarding the Rezko-Obama ties, William Miceli, is the same person who is listed as the “owner” of Obama’s Chicago Greenwood home." via: http:// deathby1000papercuts.com/ 2008/12/ obamas-rezko-ties-cook-coun ty-clerks-office-lists-att orney-as-owner-of-obama-ch icago-home/

Now we know Micelli involved with Woodlawn, you know Valerie is involved We went over it.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Say something, or quit. If you don’t know you’re being used like a puppet in a national movement by anti-American factions with an anti-American agenda, then you should not hold the office you’re in.

You’re too smart to be fooled. The undercurrent is about much more than a few police brutality cases, valid or invalid. The undercurrent is about anarchy and a turnaround in the democratic process, led by an out-going President, an out-going Attorney General and black radical leaders in the likes of Al Sharpton who not only foments disorder, he has been given a huge platform, aided by a complicit national media base.

This nationwide movement is no accident, it is obviously well-planned and nonspontaneous. You know, and we know, that this is about social change where the law is undermined by the lawless, and the law enforcers are portrayed as the evil doers, while real evil doers are esteemed and martyrized.

Complaints about overuse of force by police will always arise as an issue, because police deal with violent people, hardened criminals, anarchists and crazies…all the time. And sometimes, yes, cops will get carried away and if they are wrong, they should be held to account. One million cops in this country handle over one million violent crimes a year, not to mention many more millions of drug crimes, sex crimes, domestic crimes, thievery, traffic, emergencies of all kinds and life-saving events. Physical confrontations are inevitable, particularly when violators resist arrest. From the many calls for police service, a few complaints will be filed and some of them will be valid. That’s life in the crime world….the world in which police officers are immersed daily.

Police officers must have an above average IQ to pass the entry test. Therefore, they cannot be so stupid as to purposefully target people of color for harassment, false arrests and brutality. Not in today’s world, where cops are under constant scrutiny. Those days are long gone. You know that. Some of these controversial officers may have erred, but if they did, it had nothing – nothing – to do with race. But it’s what your boss, the mayor, wants us to believe, it’s what Sharpton, Holder and Obama want us to believe. It’s what some irresponsible journalists want us to believe.

You’ve been in law enforcement nearly fifty years, which includes leadership of a half dozen large agencies. I know you don’t believe that Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon, and the others, had anything to do with racism or profiling. You know that, but you remain mute.

The hard reality is that black men commit 73 percent of murders and other violent crime in America while they only comprise 13 percent of the population. Cops don’t ask to be called to robberies, or domestic violence in progress, or murders and burglaries. But they go. And in today’s world, their peril is not only the criminals who would do them harm, but the watchdogs and sofa critics who want to see them vilified, hated and psychologically disarmed.

If they are ever successful, it will ultimately bring the downfall of this great country.

Chief Bratton, I watched you standing behind the new mayor of New York City as he delivered speech after speech, broad brushing police officers as monsters. Why are you lock-step with the race baiters asserting that race discrimination is systemic in police agencies when you KNOW it is not true? How can you stomach that? How can you look yourself in the mirror knowing you are made to appear supportive of this kind of anti-American, anti-police and untrue rhetoric?

You’ve had a great career, Chief. You’ve accomplished a lot. You are worthy of admiration. Don’t spoil it now by being a part of this charade. You’re too good for that.

Other police professionals, chiefs and police unions are speaking out. Your voice would carry more weight than any. Come on, Chief, you don’t really need the job. The people need to know what is really happening from behind the scenes. Do the right thing. Tell the truth.

Monday, December 01, 2014

It would seem that most parents of the inner cities don’t teach growing kids to respect authority and the rules of law. Both are necessary to an orderly society. If Michael Brown had grown up being praised for good behavior and disciplined for thuggery, he would probably be alive today.

The deaths of Trayvon Martin (2012) and Michael Brown (2014) would never have happened if not for blatant disregard for the law and the people who we entrust to protect. While the media focus is entirely on the allegations that George Zimmerman (2012) and Officer Darren Wilson (2014) committed acts of racist violence toward “children,” we hear little discussion about their actual behavior.

Trayvon Martin was a seventeen year-old Miami resident who was suspended from school for two weeks for having marijuana in his book bag, not to mention unexplained female jewelry and a burglar tool. He’d also been suspended on previous occasions for truancy and graffiti.

During his suspension, Martin was sent to his father’s home in Sanford, Florida, who lived in a modest gated development with a history of break-ins. George Zimmerman was the neighborhood watch coordinator whose job it was to report crimes and any suspicious behavior to the police. That’s what happened on the night of February 26, 2012, when Zimmerman spotted a suspicious male walking in the darkness wearing a hoodie. When Zimmerman called the police, the dispatcher suggested that he back off until the police arrived. Nevertheless, Zimmerman kept the suspicious man in sight, and upon leaving his vehicle was suddenly confronted by an angry Trayvon Martin, who said, “You got a problem with me?”

Now startled, Zimmerman stopped and replied, “No.”

According to Zimmerman, Trayvon said, “Now you do.” Martin delivered a hard fist – a sucker punch – into Zimmerman’s face, knocking him to the ground. That was an act of aggression and violence.

Trayvon Martin then sat atop Zimmerman pummeling him until the watchman was able to retrieve his gun and fire one shot. Trayvon Martin died. George Zimmerman survived, though his head was bleeding front and back from several wounds.

Here’s the wrap:

Trayvon Martin was 6’2” and an athletic football player. Zimmerman was 5’8” and unmatched to Martin’s power.
Trayvon Martin only had to walk two more houses to reach his house and ignore Zimmerman.
Even though Zimmerman continued to follow, he committed no crime. He merely kept Martin in sight.
Trayvon Martin initiated the act of thuggery by beating Zimmerman.
Despite all this, George Zimmerman was vilified in the media and the black community as a racist. The Jacksonville State Attorney filed charges against Zimmerman to appease the black power bloc, knowing it was a losing case and that Zimmerman only acted in self defense.

Along comes 18 year-0ld Michael Brown, on August 9th, 2014. Brown physically bullied a store merchant while stealing (a felony, strong-arm robbery) and was then confronted by a patrolling police officer who only told him and his friend to stop walking in the middle of the street, as a police officer should do. Brown’s response was a surprise physical attack on the cop through the car window, sucker-punching the cop in the face and then going for his firearm.

These are not the actions of a poor, innocent, teenage black child.

Michael Brown had now committed two felonies, including an attack on the officer, to which the officer gave chase (a lawful action) and demanded, at gunpoint, that Brown lay on the ground. Instead, Brown charged the cop, twice. The “boy” was almost 6’5” and weighed 300 pounds. The cop fired his gun in self defense.

All the shoulda coulda scenarios are great for the sofa judges, but when you’re not in that insta-moment, no one can say exactly what they would have done different. The bottom line is that Michael Brown brought about the end result by his own actions. He acted like a thug, committing two violent felonies within minutes of each other, conceivably to impress his little friend. Nevertheless, this had nothing to do with racism.

No one wants to hear about poor kids who are killed. But the cold, hard facts cannot be denied.

Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin broke laws and violently assaulted guardians of the community acting like thugs.
The guardians of the community acted lawfully while executing their responsibilities.
Both decedents brought about their own demise.
Neither were acts of racism. Not even close.
Zimmerman and Wilson are relegated to live in hiding, though innocent of any crime.
Race baiters rule. Just ask the merchants of Ferguson, Missouri.
If people would back away and view the entire fiasco from aside, the shootings, the players, the media, the politicians and the race baiters, one thing comes clear: Bad guys are the good guys; good guys are the bad guys.

Sunday, November 09, 2014

“I am not on the ballot this fall. Michelle’s pretty happy about that. But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.”

– President Barack Obama, October 2, 2014

The next question is: Now that the majority of voters have clearly expressed their disapproval of your policies, Mr. President, what are you going to do about it?

I suspect Mr. Obama is so marinated in power and self-love, he will continue to lead by executive mandate and do what he can to disregard the will of the people. He has a mission, and this election is a stumbling block in that mission. His words:

“The fundamental transformation of America.”

I’ve listened to an array of analyses about the outcome of this election and why the republicans did so well against the once-popular president. Most pundits point to the economy, how the $18 trillion debt continues to pile up untethered, though, in 2008, this president accused George W. Bush of being “unpatriotic” for allowing the debt to increase $5 trillion under his watch. If a $5 trillion increase is unpatriotic, how unpatriotic is a $8 trillion increase which has accrued on Obama’s watch?

By every measure possible, blacks are no better off today than the day he took office. He injects the race card into local happenings which should only be dealt with by the justice system. Immigration is unchecked, with hundreds of thousands of children virtually invited to come to this country as illegals, with guaranteed protections. But these are not the real reason republicans won so many seats this election.

People have been told that this is has been a do-nothing, republican-controlled congress. But those people are unaware that the House of Representatives has passed over 350 bills which were sent to the senate for debate and votes. But that didn’t happen. The overwhelming majority of congressional bills that reached Sen. Harry Reid have gone no further than his desk. No debate. No vote. Reid has been the president’s protective moat. Nothing gets by him. The president hasn’t vetoed bills because hardly any reached his desk. Senator Reid has blocked the votes and then falsely blamed the republican led congress for doing nothing. But that’s not the real reason the republicans did so well.

Neither is it about the IRS or VA scandals, or the Benghazi cover-up fiasco, or the abysmal Obamacare roll-out and the lost jobs that have resulted from businesses being required to insure employees who work over 40 hours a week. So much for full-time jobs. Some people are disillusioned with the community organizer-turned president for those things, and many more. But that’s not the real reason for the major shift in congressional power.

Of course, no one likes the idea that a president can be so glib and unfeeling, that he would make a prepared statement to the press about an American journalist being beheaded on television by radical Islamists, then tee off on the golf course 8 minutes later. Neither do the people appreciate releasing five of the deadliest terrorists on earth from custody – back to the world of killing Americans – all for the political release of an American prisoner who only became a prisoner because he deserted his assignment in a war zone, putting his fellow soldiers at risk.

Well…maybe these last few items are part of the reason. You see, I think Mr. Obama has become so comfortable in his role as president that he feels invulnerable. And the American people are beginning to truly see that. People are beginning to see through, and they don’t like what’s behind that mask.

Much of his downfall stems for the disastrous policies on the foreign stage. People see a man determined – from the very beginning of his presidency—to support a radical Islamic agenda while doing all he can to present an appearance otherwise. The Islamic world today, particularly in the middle-east, is far worse, and far more dangerous for freedom-loving people of the planet, than it was when he took office. Mr. Obama has done everything he could to provide support for the actions and motives of the Muslim Brotherhood, here and abroad, which has led to the crises we are seeing today.

The brash pull-out of any and all American troops from Iraq – which was not only unnecessary, it was dangerous – virtually opened the door for al Qaeda and ISIS to move in to fill the void. It’s hard to conceive that he didn’t know all this, and wasn’t fully apprised of the risks by his upper military command, that Iraq would fall if we didn’t stay. It’s hard to conceive that he didn’t know that al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood would take over Libya, Tunisia and Egypt once the administration supported regime changes in those nations.

People see this. They see the reality of ISIS and what they do to non-Muslims, and decent Muslims who do not conform to their barbaric ideology. People know that the secular Egyptian people are eager to join with the western world in peace, which is why 30 million Egyptians took to the streets to oust Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood which was SUPPORTED BY BARACK OBAMA.

The bottom line: If this president supports the Muslim Brotherhood, then he cannot support the United States. That’s like saying you support Jews and support Hitler at the same time.

People see how inept this president is when dealing with the Russian despot. They see that eastern Europe is now weaker than ever, due to policies enacted by this president. They see that Iran is continuing to march toward a nuclear bomb. They see that Israel is under constant bombardment by Hamas (which was fostered by the Muslim Brotherhood), while this president shows contempt for the leader of Israel. And how many times has the “Christian” president denounced the Christian genocide that is happening in so many Islamic territories.

Where is the American Army in African countries, where hundreds of women have been raped, kidnapped and brought into slavery? Why hasn’t our country joined with France and England in temporarily barring routine commercial flights from countries stricken with Ebola?

This can be a very long article, but I think we see the point. A lot of folks voted against Barack Obama this past Tuesday, not necessarily for the republican party. They voted to strip him of as much power as possible for the next two years, and the only way to do that was to vote for a majority senate and the elimination of the worse senate majority leader in the history of the United States, Harry Reid.

Now it’s time for the republicans to seize this chance for two years to produce positive results and stand up to this president, who is an overt danger to the United States…not yet fully transformed, thank goodness.

Saturday, November 01, 2014

Israel is never free from attacks by Hamas, PLO, Hezbollah, … they are surrounded by cultures and countries that- for 66 years — openly vow they will not be satisfied until Israel is utterly destroyed. Nevertheless, Israel is unnecessarily torn in the middle by the Obama administration who pressure and ridicule Netanyahu, as though he’s the bad guy…while Jihadi rockets continue to explode in their towns and streets.

It is a sad time, indeed, for we have never had worse relations with our Israeli allies since it became a country in 1948, than we do now. I’ve always said, and nothing has shown me any different, that Barack Obama plays both sides, but his heart on the side of the Islamists.

This is the reason that I encourage everyone to vote straight down the line Republican this election, no matter the candidate, to pull the rug out from his power base, and prevent him from acting as dictator for his lame duck two years. He relies on support from state governors and senators, and congressmen to carry out his long range mission…in his words…”the fundamental transformation of America.” Let’s not give it to him.

Remember, nothing is better today in the world stage, than when Obama took office, particularly in the Islamist blocs. When we leave Afghanistan, the same thing will happen as has happened in Iraq, which should never have been totally abandoned by American forces. The saving grace is that Egypt rose up when the people saw they were being forced under the yoke of Shariah by Muslim Brotherhood rule – which Obama and Hillary Clinton supported. Let that sink in folks — Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton adamantly supported the Muslim Brotherhood. The people of Egypt rose up in defiance, with banners and signs all over the nation denoting Obama and Hillary as sympathizers with terrorists. That’s the truth.

Notice how we have not heard much from the administration since Morsi was deposed by the people of Egypt? Our attention is being diverted from one of the administration’s most embarrassing (and revealing) mistakes.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

While we are fed constant news about ISIS, Ebola and a questionable police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, we seem to have lost interest in what is happening on the Israeli front, where rockets continue to pound civilian targets inside their borders and innocent people keep running for their lives. Hamas must love all the outside world’s distractions as they relentlessly fire missile on top of missile into Israeli civilian targets in the hopes of killing anyone for the sake of killing and terrorizing.

Nothing appears in American news feed – not easily found anyway – which tells more of the story, as the Obama administration has blocked all shipments of defensive armament support to Israel, our strongest ally (supposedly) in the middle east. No explanation given. This is reported in the Jewish Press, which is not known for making up false stories.

So this is where we’ve come. Not only is ISIS terrorizing Iraq and Syria into an Islamic State, target bombings be laughable, we are giving a lower (or no) priority to our Israeli partner’s survival. This falls completely into the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islam.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Three things are immediately obvious when one examines the biography of John Louis Esposito, American academic expert on Islam. The first is that -- as noted by his official biographical listing of more than forty-five books and monographs, along with his standing as editor of several reference series -- he seems indefatigably prolific, though the bulk of his writings present interpretations of contemporary phenomena rather than original research. The second is that he luxuriates in honors, including those bestowed by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other parties in whose objectivity about Islamic affairs few can believe. Finally, his work has provided an unremitting "explanation" that amounts to a committed defense of radical, rather than traditional, Islam. Esposito aspires to become the chief interlocutor between the U.S., if not the West as a whole, and the Muslim lands -- especially the extremist elements in Islamic societies.
In his career as an academic and public intellectual, Esposito has emphasized his conviction that Islamist ideology is a path to liberation of Muslim societies from oppression, and, like many other Middle East studies experts, he is quick to accuse critics of Muslim radicalism of Islamophobia. He has accumulated a further sheaf of statements that should be embarrassing to him, but apparently is not. Most offensively, he stood up for Sami Al-Arian, who pled guilty in 2006 to a charge of providing services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Specially Designated Terrorist Organization according to the U.S. government. At an August 18, 2007 fundraising event in Dallas for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading American Islamist group, Esposito declared, "Sami Al-Arian's a very good friend of mine."

On the same occasion, he affirmed his solidarity with "the Holy Land Fund [sic, Holy Land Foundation], but also with CAIR." Five principal leaders of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and the organization itself were found guilty in 2008 on 108 charges of support for Hamas. The U.S. authorities had already added HLF to the roster of Specially Designated Terrorist Organizations in 2001, but in the view of Esposito, as recorded on National Public Radio on October 22, 1994, Hamas was "a community-focused group that engages in 'honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture.'"
On July 2, 2008, Esposito penned a lachrymose description, addressed to U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, of Al-Arian as a "dedicated family man. ... Sami Al-Arian is a proud, dedicated and committed American as well as a proud and committed Palestinian. He is an extraordinarily bright, articulate scholar and intellectual-activist, a man of conscience with a strong commitment to peace and social justice."

Esposito is University Professor as well as Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is also the founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU) in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service, renamed the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) in 2005, after twelve years in existence, upon the receipt of a $20-million gift from the Saudi prince. Bin Talal became known to Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when he attempted to hand a $10-million donation to then-mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani. The prince's check was accompanied by a declaration that "the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause." Giuliani returned the check and rejected Bin Talal's criticism. Four years later, Esposito evinced no such qualms.

Partly educated in and long employed by Catholic institutions, Esposito received his B.A. in philosophy from St. Antony's College, at Oxford in the U.K., in 1963; his M.A. in theology from St. John's University in New York three years later; and his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies, with a minor in comparative religions, at Temple University (Philadelphia) in 1974. From 1975 to 1995 he taught at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, founded by members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and in 1993, he began his career at Georgetown, another Jesuit institution, with a two-year overlap between the two schools.

Aside from these credentials, Esposito has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, and also as vice chair of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID). In such activities, Esposito's sympathy for radicalism thrives: MESA is rife with anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Islamist propaganda camouflaged as scholarship, while CSID is an open advocate for Islamist ideology. Esposito is also vice president (2011) and president-elect (2012) of the American Academy of Religion.

Esposito's wanderings in Islamic affairs have led him along paths that appear distinct to an outsider, but which all end in the same place: advocacy for Islamist governance. His published works include the 2003 volume Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gülen Movement (Syracuse University Press), coauthored with M. Hakan Yavuz -- an enthusiastic depiction of the ideological movement directed by the leading Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gülen, presented in the volume as equivalent to "Turkish Islam" in general. This book was followed by a 2010 collection of encomia to Gülen, titled Islam and Peacebuilding: Gülen Movement Initiatives, co-edited with Ihsan Yilmaz and published by Bluedome Press, an apparent Gülenist enterprise. The Gülen movement comprises a major element in the political apparatus created by the Islamist Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym, the AKP; led by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and holding power in Turkey since 2002.

Esposito has also collaborated with the Turkish academic Ibrahim Kalin, currently a visiting researcher at Georgetown, on a new book, Islamophobia and the Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, published in March 2011 by Oxford University Press. Kalin, a senior adviser to Erdoğan, actively supports the AKP line that "Turkey is certain to increase its multi-leveled engagement policy in the Arab world." This for the Al-Jazeera broadcasting system in June 2011, following the third national electoral triumph for the AKP, which Kalin hailed as "a victory not only for Prime Minister Erdoğan but also for Turkish democracy."

Esposito has also toiled in the ideological fields of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which awarded him its 1996 World Book Prize, although his C.V., which differs from his Georgetown biography, doesn't name the book. But his most notable service -- by far -- is to Saudi Arabia and its official Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In his endeavors, Esposito has availed himself of three females he has mentored through careers in academia and public policy: Natana DeLong-Bas, Hadia Mubarak, and Dalia Mogahed. The activities of these scholars, whom Esposito has nurtured, offer further evidence of Esposito's radicalizing influence within Middle East studies.

Georgetown graduate DeLong-Bas, who also taught at Brandeis, is now a part-time faculty member in the theology department at Boston College. In 2004 she wrote Wahhabi Islam: from Revival to Global Jihad, also published by Oxford, and produced, as she noted, with the encouragement of Esposito, with whom she had coauthored an edition of one his earlier tomes, Women in Muslim Family Law (Syracuse, 2002). Further, DeLong-Bas acknowledged the assistance of three prominent Saudis in writing her Wahhabi apologia: Prince Faisal Bin Salman, whose title she left unmentioned; Abdallah S. al-Uthaymin, son of a Wahhabi cleric; and Fahd as-Semmari, director of the King Abd Al-Aziz Foundation for Research and Archives, in Riyadh, for which she expressed thanks for financial support.

Here the Esposito method was laid bare: thanks to his sponsorship, Saudi money subsidized a U.S. academic product intended to ameliorate the image of Wahhabism, the most extreme fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in modern times, and the inspirer of so-called "Salafi" radicals, from the Muslim Brotherhood through the South Asian jihadist movement founded by Abul Ala Mawdudi to al-Qaeda. In the mind of DeLong-Bas, Wahhabism could be considered, as noted in a review of the book, "peaceful, traditional, spiritual, and even feminist."

DeLong-Bas outdid herself, however, in an interview with the Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat on December 21, 2006. Therein she denied that Wahhabism was extreme; that Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and the movement's foremost ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, were jihadists; and, most incredibly, that there was evidence for the involvement of the then-living Osama bin Laden in the 9/11 attacks.

Next among Esposito's prominent female disciples came Hadia Mubarak, a researcher at CMCU, who arrived there via a post as national president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) of the U.S. and Canada and as a board member of CAIR, two leading components of the "Wahhabi lobby" in the U.S. She had received her B.A. from Florida State University and was accepted at Georgetown for graduate work. There she became inveigled in an unsuccessful but nonetheless disreputable effort to transfer $325,000 to ACMCU from the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), a fifty-seven-member international body created in 1969 to "protect" the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem from Israel. Mubarak then went to work for the Gallup Poll's Muslim World Project.

At Gallup, Mubarak joined another Esposito protégée, Dalia Mogahed. Born in Egypt and possessor of an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, Mogahed was Esposito's coauthor in what may have been his most successful -- and certainly his most widely-cited -- book, Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, published in 2008 by Gallup Press. As Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), described the volume, Esposito and Mogahed claimed that "'everyday Muslims' are so similar to ordinary Americans that 'conflict between the Muslim and Western communities is far from inevitable.'" Satloff continued:

Similar arguments have been made before; some of this is true, some is rubbish, much is irrelevant[.] ... The question often revolves around a disputed data point: Of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, how many are radicals? ... The book draws on a mammoth, six-year effort to poll and interview tens of thousands of Muslims in more than 35 countries with Muslim majorities or substantial minorities[.] ... The answer to that all-important question, the authors say, is 7 percent[.] ... The not-so-hidden purpose of this book is to blur any difference between average Muslims around the world and average Americans, and the authors rise to the occasion at every turn.

Satloff noted that at a WINEP event hosted for Mogahed, she admitted that "[t]he book is a book about the modern Muslim world that used its polling to inform its analysis. So that's important: It's meant for a general audience, and it's not meant to be a polling report." Mogahed is also known for her lighthearted treatment of Islamic law as protective of women, among other adventures in the company of extremists.

These slippery methods, inculcated by Esposito in his three female acolytes, exemplify, as much as his own signed work, the outlook Esposito has adopted and pursued throughout his career. In a remarkably candid 2005 interview with him in a periodical, The Muslim Weekly, the paper's writer, Scott Jaschik, noted Esposito's repellent cynicism:

Esposito's career took off after the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, and everyone could see the power of political Islam. "I owe my Lexus and my career to the Ayatollah Khomeini," he tells his students at Georgetown.

Jaschik further wrote:

It is an article of faith to many policy makers...that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood are terrorist groups who should be denied any role in political discussions or civil society. Esposito -- while condemning suicide bombings and attacks on civilians as 'immoral' -- says these groups cannot be written off.

During the recent upheavals in the Middle East, when one would expect Esposito, as an expert on Islam and revolution, to be at the forefront of advocacy for change in countries where dictatorships had used Islam as a cover for political oppression, the Georgetown professor was and has been uncharacteristically quiet, limiting his comments to vague, perfunctory blog articles loaded with stereotypes. In one, co-authored with yet another CMCU researcher, Sheila Lalwani, we read:

Policymakers must move beyond policies that equated protection of national interests with the stability and security of regimes and were driven more by fear of the unknown than support for Western principles of self-determination, democracy and human rights.

In another, signed with Dalia Mogahed, we find:

Old habits die hard[.] ... Clinging to a failed narrative and the threat of a hostile Islamist takeover, risks succumbing to the temptation to 'encourage' or influence a specific outcome in Arab elections which will validate the concerns of Egyptians and others in the Arab world.

That's the real Esposito, even if somewhat watered down: discounting the threat of radical Islam even as it makes a flamboyant entry, particularly in the Egyptian Revolution. Yes, indeed, old habits do die hard. On that point, there can be no disagreement with John Louis Esposito.

Stephen Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. He wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Three things are immediately obvious when one examines the biography of John Louis Esposito, American academic expert on Islam. The first is that -- as noted by his official biographical listing of more than forty-five books and monographs, along with his standing as editor of several reference series -- he seems indefatigably prolific, though the bulk of his writings present interpretations of contemporary phenomena rather than original research. The second is that he luxuriates in honors, including those bestowed by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other parties in whose objectivity about Islamic affairs few can believe. Finally, his work has provided an unremitting "explanation" that amounts to a committed defense of radical, rather than traditional, Islam. Esposito aspires to become the chief interlocutor between the U.S., if not the West as a whole, and the Muslim lands -- especially the extremist elements in Islamic societies.

In his career as an academic and public intellectual, Esposito has emphasized his conviction that Islamist ideology is a path to liberation of Muslim societies from oppression, and, like many other Middle East studies experts, he is quick to accuse critics of Muslim radicalism of Islamophobia. He has accumulated a further sheaf of statements that should be embarrassing to him, but apparently is not. Most offensively, he stood up for Sami Al-Arian, who pled guilty in 2006 to a charge of providing services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Specially Designated Terrorist Organization according to the U.S. government. At an August 18, 2007 fundraising event in Dallas for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading American Islamist group, Esposito declared, "Sami Al-Arian's a very good friend of mine."

On the same occasion, he affirmed his solidarity with "the Holy Land Fund [sic, Holy Land Foundation], but also with CAIR." Five principal leaders of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and the organization itself were found guilty in 2008 on 108 charges of support for Hamas. The U.S. authorities had already added HLF to the roster of Specially Designated Terrorist Organizations in 2001, but in the view of Esposito, as recorded on National Public Radio on October 22, 1994, Hamas was "a community-focused group that engages in 'honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture.'"

On July 2, 2008, Esposito penned a lachrymose description, addressed to U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, of Al-Arian as a "dedicated family man. ... Sami Al-Arian is a proud, dedicated and committed American as well as a proud and committed Palestinian. He is an extraordinarily bright, articulate scholar and intellectual-activist, a man of conscience with a strong commitment to peace and social justice."

Esposito is University Professor as well as Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is also the founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU) in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service, renamed the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) in 2005, after twelve years in existence, upon the receipt of a $20-million gift from the Saudi prince. Bin Talal became known to Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when he attempted to hand a $10-million donation to then-mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani. The prince's check was accompanied by a declaration that "the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause." Giuliani returned the check and rejected Bin Talal's criticism. Four years later, Esposito evinced no such qualms.

Partly educated in and long employed by Catholic institutions, Esposito received his B.A. in philosophy from St. Antony's College, at Oxford in the U.K., in 1963; his M.A. in theology from St. John's University in New York three years later; and his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies, with a minor in comparative religions, at Temple University (Philadelphia) in 1974. From 1975 to 1995 he taught at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, founded by members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and in 1993, he began his career at Georgetown, another Jesuit institution, with a two-year overlap between the two schools.

Aside from these credentials, Esposito has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, and also as vice chair of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID). In such activities, Esposito's sympathy for radicalism thrives: MESA is rife with anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Islamist propaganda camouflaged as scholarship, while CSID is an open advocate for Islamist ideology. Esposito is also vice president (2011) and president-elect (2012) of the American Academy of Religion.

Esposito's wanderings in Islamic affairs have led him along paths that appear distinct to an outsider, but which all end in the same place: advocacy for Islamist governance. His published works include the 2003 volume Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gülen Movement (Syracuse University Press), coauthored with M. Hakan Yavuz -- an enthusiastic depiction of the ideological movement directed by the leading Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gülen, presented in the volume as equivalent to "Turkish Islam" in general. This book was followed by a 2010 collection of encomia to Gülen, titled Islam and Peacebuilding: Gülen Movement Initiatives, co-edited with Ihsan Yilmaz and published by Bluedome Press, an apparent Gülenist enterprise. The Gülen movement comprises a major element in the political apparatus created by the Islamist Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym, the AKP; led by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and holding power in Turkey since 2002.

Esposito has also collaborated with the Turkish academic Ibrahim Kalin, currently a visiting researcher at Georgetown, on a new book, Islamophobia and the Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, published in March 2011 by Oxford University Press. Kalin, a senior adviser to Erdoğan, actively supports the AKP line that "Turkey is certain to increase its multi-leveled engagement policy in the Arab world." This for the Al-Jazeera broadcasting system in June 2011, following the third national electoral triumph for the AKP, which Kalin hailed as "a victory not only for Prime Minister Erdoğan but also for Turkish democracy."

Esposito has also toiled in the ideological fields of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which awarded him its 1996 World Book Prize, although his C.V., which differs from his Georgetown biography, doesn't name the book. But his most notable service -- by far -- is to Saudi Arabia and its official Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In his endeavors, Esposito has availed himself of three females he has mentored through careers in academia and public policy: Natana DeLong-Bas, Hadia Mubarak, and Dalia Mogahed. The activities of these scholars, whom Esposito has nurtured, offer further evidence of Esposito's radicalizing influence within Middle East studies.

Georgetown graduate DeLong-Bas, who also taught at Brandeis, is now a part-time faculty member in the theology department at Boston College. In 2004 she wrote Wahhabi Islam: from Revival to Global Jihad, also published by Oxford, and produced, as she noted, with the encouragement of Esposito, with whom she had coauthored an edition of one his earlier tomes, Women in Muslim Family Law (Syracuse, 2002). Further, DeLong-Bas acknowledged the assistance of three prominent Saudis in writing her Wahhabi apologia: Prince Faisal Bin Salman, whose title she left unmentioned; Abdallah S. al-Uthaymin, son of a Wahhabi cleric; and Fahd as-Semmari, director of the King Abd Al-Aziz Foundation for Research and Archives, in Riyadh, for which she expressed thanks for financial support.

Here the Esposito method was laid bare: thanks to his sponsorship, Saudi money subsidized a U.S. academic product intended to ameliorate the image of Wahhabism, the most extreme fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in modern times, and the inspirer of so-called "Salafi" radicals, from the Muslim Brotherhood through the South Asian jihadist movement founded by Abul Ala Mawdudi to al-Qaeda. In the mind of DeLong-Bas, Wahhabism could be considered, as noted in a review of the book, "peaceful, traditional, spiritual, and even feminist."

DeLong-Bas outdid herself, however, in an interview with the Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat on December 21, 2006. Therein she denied that Wahhabism was extreme; that Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and the movement's foremost ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, were jihadists; and, most incredibly, that there was evidence for the involvement of the then-living Osama bin Laden in the 9/11 attacks.

Next among Esposito's prominent female disciples came Hadia Mubarak, a researcher at CMCU, who arrived there via a post as national president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) of the U.S. and Canada and as a board member of CAIR, two leading components of the "Wahhabi lobby" in the U.S. She had received her B.A. from Florida State University and was accepted at Georgetown for graduate work. There she became inveigled in an unsuccessful but nonetheless disreputable effort to transfer $325,000 to ACMCU from the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), a fifty-seven-member international body created in 1969 to "protect" the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem from Israel. Mubarak then went to work for the Gallup Poll's Muslim World Project.

At Gallup, Mubarak joined another Esposito protégée, Dalia Mogahed. Born in Egypt and possessor of an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, Mogahed was Esposito's coauthor in what may have been his most successful -- and certainly his most widely-cited -- book, Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, published in 2008 by Gallup Press. As Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), described the volume, Esposito and Mogahed claimed that "'everyday Muslims' are so similar to ordinary Americans that 'conflict between the Muslim and Western communities is far from inevitable.'" Satloff continued:

Similar arguments have been made before; some of this is true, some is rubbish, much is irrelevant[.] ... The question often revolves around a disputed data point: Of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, how many are radicals? ... The book draws on a mammoth, six-year effort to poll and interview tens of thousands of Muslims in more than 35 countries with Muslim majorities or substantial minorities[.] ... The answer to that all-important question, the authors say, is 7 percent[.] ... The not-so-hidden purpose of this book is to blur any difference between average Muslims around the world and average Americans, and the authors rise to the occasion at every turn.

Satloff noted that at a WINEP event hosted for Mogahed, she admitted that "[t]he book is a book about the modern Muslim world that used its polling to inform its analysis. So that's important: It's meant for a general audience, and it's not meant to be a polling report." Mogahed is also known for her lighthearted treatment of Islamic law as protective of women, among other adventures in the company of extremists.

These slippery methods, inculcated by Esposito in his three female acolytes, exemplify, as much as his own signed work, the outlook Esposito has adopted and pursued throughout his career. In a remarkably candid 2005 interview with him in a periodical, The Muslim Weekly, the paper's writer, Scott Jaschik, noted Esposito's repellent cynicism:

Esposito's career took off after the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, and everyone could see the power of political Islam. "I owe my Lexus and my career to the Ayatollah Khomeini," he tells his students at Georgetown.

Jaschik further wrote:

It is an article of faith to many policy makers...that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood are terrorist groups who should be denied any role in political discussions or civil society. Esposito -- while condemning suicide bombings and attacks on civilians as 'immoral' -- says these groups cannot be written off.

During the recent upheavals in the Middle East, when one would expect Esposito, as an expert on Islam and revolution, to be at the forefront of advocacy for change in countries where dictatorships had used Islam as a cover for political oppression, the Georgetown professor was and has been uncharacteristically quiet, limiting his comments to vague, perfunctory blog articles loaded with stereotypes. In one, co-authored with yet another CMCU researcher, Sheila Lalwani, we read:

Policymakers must move beyond policies that equated protection of national interests with the stability and security of regimes and were driven more by fear of the unknown than support for Western principles of self-determination, democracy and human rights.

In another, signed with Dalia Mogahed, we find:

Old habits die hard[.] ... Clinging to a failed narrative and the threat of a hostile Islamist takeover, risks succumbing to the temptation to 'encourage' or influence a specific outcome in Arab elections which will validate the concerns of Egyptians and others in the Arab world.

That's the real Esposito, even if somewhat watered down: discounting the threat of radical Islam even as it makes a flamboyant entry, particularly in the Egyptian Revolution. Yes, indeed, old habits do die hard. On that point, there can be no disagreement with John Louis Esposito.

Stephen Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. He wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

by Tabitha Korol
NPR’s political position is heard by many, and its audience is led to sympathize with the Islamic enemies of civilization. Our very future is in upheaval and I challenge NPR’s motives, ethics, and sense of responsibility.

I have written NPR (Notorious for Palestinian Revisionism) in the past, regarding its position on the war of Islam against Israel, the Jews and Christians worldwide. Whether it is Hamas, ISIS, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, and even the most ludicrous appellation – “religion of peace,” their goal is the same: global conquest and the spread of Islam and Sharia law. The Hamas charter applies to all Muslims, including Palestinians, and how it obligates them to continue their 1400 years of bloodshed until the world is entirely Islamic, under Allah. Their history and plans are clearly delineated in the first paragraph of their Covenant – they obliterated cultures before and will continue doing so in the future. What is it about “obliterate” that NPR doesn’t understand?

Hamas Covenant

In the name of the Most Merciful Allah

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it just as it obliterated others before it. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts.”

Hamas’s name means Islamic Resistance Movement in Arabic -- violence. They will never recognize the State of Israel’s right to exist as an independent sovereign nation, and Islam intends to “wipe it out as it wiped out what went before.” Moslems follow Mohammad’s behavior and decrees for jihad against all who reject Allah as their god and Mohammad as their prophet. They wiped out civilizations before in the Middle East, destroyed artifacts to erase all remnants of their existence, and they continue their malevolence, death, destruction, enslavement and looting. Their methods are numerous and adaptable, using violence as needed, and stealth jihad where it is more prudent. They will decapitate for expediency, but infiltrate into government and schools, using propaganda and deceit. They are inventive and methodical, and above all, dedicated.

Followed by every lame apology is another NPR report to the ill-informed, vulnerable public, using every myth and canard to claim Palestinian victimization by Israel. If there were a modicum of sincerity and honest journalism, the reporters would properly investigate incidents and compare their findings with those of the Jerusalem Post or Arutz Sheva before going to print.

Hamas, a Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, Canada, the European Union and Japan, yet NPR continues to transmit its dishonesty to the masses. Hamas is responsible for suicide bombings, murder tunnels, unspeakable slaughter and mayhem, and the launching of tens of thousands of rockets and missiles to harm innocent civilians and children in Israel (not to mention the chaos, kidnapping and enslaving of students in Africa) and is now restoring to daily routine their 7th century barbarian practice of chopping heads of innocent civilians to Europe and America.

Be reminded that this death cult has no qualms about victimizing their own women and children, using them as human bombs and human shields to gain public sympathy. By contrast, it has been proven that the IDF does its utmost to avoid civilian casualties when retaliating against Hamas forces. Israel is a small home to many religions and nationalities, fighting for its survival amid a sea of 1.3 billion trained, obedient, riot-ready Muslims on a land mass a thousand times the size of Israel. Americans benefit from Israel’s industry, creativity, accomplishments in science and medicine. NPR’s staff would live freely in Israel, but eventually face a subservient life and horrific death in an Islamic country, yet they support the global Islamic cause as though they were mad or suicidal. Even NPR is being hoodwinked by its deceptive reporters.

Therefore I need to convey that Israel was vindicated by the United Nations’ damage assessment of Gaza. They confirm that Israel attacked Hamas targets with restraint.

· Israel did not retaliate by rote against Hamas’s systematic attacks on civilian targets, but bombed specific facilities, bases, weapons and tunnels.

· Most of the damage was limited to areas of 25 meters or less, and most of Gaza was not damaged – less than 5 percent of Gaza was hit by the IDF.

· The most populated areas were disproportionally UNdamaged, or had limited damage.

· The areas reported in the UN damage assessment report are compatible with the IDF briefings on Hamas’s battle areas.

· When Hamas deliberately concentrated its terror against Israeli civilians from densely populated urban areas in Gaza, the areas were undamaged.

· Israel demonstrated exceptional efforts to minimize collateral damage by warning civilians, thereby forfeiting the surprise effect; they were guided by security rather than retaliatory or political expediency.

· Israel followed surgical bombing tactics, not carpet bombing, not random or indiscriminate.

· Most Israeli bombing hit terror-related sites, such as multiple tunnel entrances and shafts, and mortar and missile launching sites.

Does NPR grasp that their protection emboldens Muslims to increase their evil against the world, and that what Islam does in Israel, England and Sweden will soon become conventional in America? Perhaps NPR can explain how its staff is preparing to survive our destruction. Any stealth funds they receive will only guarantee that they will not be eaten by the Islamic crocodile first; but they will be eaten.

NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro has reported that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are “seen” as illegal, rather than asserting that they are legal under the Balfour Declaration, San Remo Treaty, League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate (article 6), and UN Security Council Resolution 242. She has reported that Israeli residents are violent toward Palestinian residents, but statistics prove otherwise.

NPR reported that Mayor Goldsmith “said” there was a massacre of the Fogel family, but not that the massacre occurred, thereby questioning the occurrence and diminishing its importance and impact. Ignoring Palestinian violence, arson and stone throwing, Garcia-Navarro added there was “no justice for Palestinians.” Mike Shuster’s report on the Second Intifada, and Daniel Schorr’s report on the Gaza Flotilla, among others, were severely skewed.

Most recently, NPR reported the number killed in Gaza, without explaining the civilian count -- those women and children intentionally centered in the war zone to increase the horror, as Westerners express their shock at why Israelis kill so many “innocents.” NPR fails to inform the public that the IDF does and did warn citizens to flee an area that will be counterattacked, and that these dead are victims of their own people.

Will NPR ever realize that honorable journalism might be used to motivate and unite citizens to save our world before we run out of time?

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

The International Criminal Court recently issued warrants for the arrest of Ahmed Haroun, the minister for humanitarian affairs of Sudan, and Ali Kosheib, a leader of that country’s notorious janjaweed militia. The Sudanese government has refused to hand over the two for prosecution. Charges include murder, rape, torture and “imprisonment or severe deprivation of liberty.” Severe deprivation of liberty is a euphemism for slavery. Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly observed not long ago that in Sudan, “slavery, sanctioned by religious zealots, ravaged the southern parts of the country and much of the west as well.”

Muslim slavers in the Sudan primarily enslave non-Muslims, and chiefly Christians. According to the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights and abolitionist movement, “The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The black animist and Christian South has been ravaged for many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.”

The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids “were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005….According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border -- many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan….Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue.” One modern-day Sudanese Christian slave, James Pareng Alier, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was twelve years old. Religion was a major element of his ordeal: “I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised “Ahmed.” They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight.” Alier has no idea of his family’s whereabouts. But while non-Muslims slaves are often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains: “It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”

Anti-slavery crusaders like Messaoud have great difficulty working against this attitude because it is rooted in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example. The Muslim prophet Muhammad owned slaves, and like the Bible, the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted, even as it enjoins the freeing of slaves under certain circumstances, such as the breaking of an oath: “Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom” (5:89). But while the freeing of a slave or two here and there is encouraged, the institution itself is never questioned. The Qur’an even gives a man permission to have sexual relations with his slave girls as well as with his wives: “The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame…” (23:1-6). A Muslim is not to have sexual relations with a woman who is married to someone else – except a slave girl: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess. It is a decree of Allah for you” (4:24).

In the past, as today, most slaves in Islam were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare. The pioneering scholar of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, Bat Ye’or, explains the system that developed out of jihad conquest:

The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276,
Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [House of War, i.e., non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.[1]

Historian Speros Vryonis observes that “since the beginning of the Arab razzias [raids] into the land of Rum [the Byzantine Empire], human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils.” As they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, the Turks reduced many of the Greeks and other non-Muslims there to slave status: “They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless.”[2] The Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever jihadists conquered a territory, “there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”[3]

Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. In an analysis of Islamic political theories, Patricia Crone notes that after a jihad battle was concluded, “male captives might be killed or enslaved…Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized [sic] by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist.”[4] Thomas Pellow, an Englishman who was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716, was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”[5]

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get stern treatment attention from historians (as well as from reparations advocates and guilt-ridden politicians), the Islamic slave trade, which actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people, is virtually ignored. (This fact magnifies the irony of Islam being presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity.) While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.[6]

And when pressure came to end slavery, it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim William Wilberforce or William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists and began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous. “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam...up to this day.” He said that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: “No one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”[7]

However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished only as a result of Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.

Besides being practiced more or less openly today in Sudan and Mauritania, there is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well -- notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

A shadow cast by the strength and perdurability of Islamic slavery can be seen in instances where Muslims have managed to import this institution to the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki, for instance, was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: “Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.” The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington, Waleed Al Saleh, and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh’s Virginia home. One of the women remarked: “I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”

All this indicates that the problem of Islamic slavery is not restricted to recent events in the Sudan; it is much larger and more deeply rooted. The United Nations and human rights organizations have noted the phenomenon, but nevertheless little has been done to move decisively against those who still hold human beings in bondage, or aid or tolerate others doing so. The UN has tried to place peacekeeping forces in Darfur, over the objections of the Sudanese government, but its remonstrations against slavery in Sudan and elsewhere have likewise not resulted in significant government action against the practice. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also noted the problem, but as HRW observes, “the government of Sudan has stonewalled on the issue of slavery, claiming it was a matter of rival tribes engaging in hostage taking, over which it had little control. That is simply untrue, as myriad reports coming out of southern Sudan have made abundantly clear.” For Islamic slavery to disappear, a powerful state would have to move against it decisively, not with mere words, and accept no equivocation of half-measures. In today’s international geopolitical climate, nothing could be less likely.

Notes:

[1] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, p. 108.
[2] Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, Berkeley, 1971. P. 174-5. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 87.
[3] K. S. Lal, Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, Aditya Prakashan, 1994. P. 9.
[4] Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam, Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp. 371-372. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 86.
[5] Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. P. 84.
[6] Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus, 2005, pp. 89-90.
[7] Quoted in Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1994. Reprinted at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is available now from Regnery Publishing.